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This chapter presents interviews with two library directors: a public library director and an academic library dean. Throughout the transcripts, there are links to contextualizing resources footnoted for your reference.

Public Library Director

This interview with Bob Swanay, Director of the Carmel Clay Public Library (CCPL) in Carmel, IN, was conducted on October 13, 2023. Here is an article from a local news outlet that provides a brief background of  Swanay as he began his role as CCPL director in 2016: New Carmel Clay Public Library Director Ready for a Bigger Role

Audio:

Here is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity:

This is an interview with the director of the Carmel Clay Public Library in Carmel, IN, Bob Swanay. Hi, Bob. Thanks so much for doing this interview.

Hi. You’re welcome, happy to do it.

What is your educational background, what led you to this career in Public Library directorship?

I come from the northeast Tennessee region, and I worked at Johnson City Public Library for 21 years. The last eight of those were as library director. I have an undergrad degree in art from East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, and I have my Master of Science in Information Sciences from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I just fell into library work. I always loved libraries and always loved reading and books; I was a big comic book reader and then a graphic novel reader. I just loved all of that. Once I started working in libraries, I like to say sometimes you get the “library bug” and you just love the work, and I did. My first library job was as a book shelver. I have been a technical services clerk. I’ve been a reference department assistant. I’ve been a reference department librarian. I’ve been a department manager and library director. I’ve gone through the whole spectrum.

What would you say are your main tasks and responsibilities on a day-to-day basis as a Director?

It really depends day-to-day what that is, but essentially, I’m responsible for the operation of the library, so some days might involve something to do with carrying out library policy or clarifying library policy. Some days it may be something to do with the budget, preparing to discuss budget with maybe city officials or the library board^[1] some days. Some days I might need to help out at one of our service desks, and I might be doing that, so that’s part of the really good thing about being the library director is that there are so many different things that one might do in a given day and a lot of the work is relationship building. So, I’m trying to build relationships with community leaders, elected officials; I have relationships with my fellow library directors, so we talk to each other and compare notes. I try to have a relationship with the library staff, because the library director is ultimately responsible. I try to have a relationship with our foundation^[2] and the set of people involved with that, that support the library financially. So, there’s a lot of relationship building in the job.

Moving on to institutional or organizational change management: what changes have you been responsible for managing and leading over the years?

I started as library director in Johnson City Public Library in 2008 and by 2010, we did a renovation, which was fun. That was a reconceptualizing of our computer area and a reconceptualizing of our audiovisual area. Essentially, at that time, we had computers scattered: some here, some there, a few in another room adjacent to the reference area; there’s some parallel to that in what we did at Carmel, but we wanted to get the computers out of the rooms. Because they were scattered and they were in study carrel furniture, it wasn’t really ideal to do training with people. So, we reorganized and created more of a classroom style layout for the computers so that we could do instructional sessions and put a big screen in front of that and things like that. So that was a fun project to be involved with.

Then of course when I started in Carmel in 2016, when I was hired by the Library board, I was charged with needing to make some updates to the building. Particularly, they were telling me, ‘we need a larger teen area, here we are beside Carmel High School with a student population of approximately 5,500,’ and they were right. Our teen area was essentially the size of a residential living room, but we have all these high school students beside us. So that was the driver that got us started. But that was a much bigger project. I started at the end of 2016, and I spent 2017 and some of 2018 developing a vision. We did hire some architects to help us with that, but we had a lot of community stakeholder meetings. We met with the board and met with our foundation people, we met with staff, we met at schools and tried to talk to as many people as we could to think about how we can reimagine the library that we have, what do we need, what are our challenges. So that’s how we wound up with this.

We developed this whole vision; and also, part of that process, which was interesting: we hired a professional polling firm, and they polled the community and learned some interesting things. At least three major points came out of that that stuck with me. One was, for the community of Carmel, the satisfaction rate for the library was in the high 90s, maybe 95-plus percent. People said they loved the library. They really loved it. Very satisfied. That’s “wow.” How many non-biased polls can you get that kind of a number? I also thought it was interesting that they like the library for various reasons, of course, because there are all kinds of reasons that you might go to the library. But the number one thing, the biggest thing that people said that they liked on that survey was the size and depth and breadth of the collection. They loved that we have a big collection here. It was a big thing for the community. Then the third thing that I saw in that was a pretty strong desire from residents on the west side who wanted a branch. So, we had a big public meeting and presented the conclusions of the vision and concluded the new vision that we had.

The first action step we took once we had that vision in place was that we started moving on creating a west branch, and things just fell together nicely because we had that vision. Then there was an opportunity to buy property: a building that was formerly Harvest Market grocery store had been empty for several years in the Village of West Clay on the west side. We were able to purchase that property and renovate it into our current branch. So, that came from that. We also hired a different set of architects once we had that vision in place. This time we hired Ratio. They’re based in Indianapolis and the big advantage with them is that they were close enough that we could have all the in-person meetings that we wanted. They could be here with us a lot. So, we started developing that vision and the vision we knew coming out of it, that we needed the larger teen space, we needed larger program space. We needed more meeting spaces. We needed to expand parking to support an expanded library. All of those things. So, we got rolling on that too.

A really interesting experience of doing all of that – this is very shorthand – is we had to work with the City Council^[3] to get certain approvals. We issued bonds to pay for it, that was another factor in the timing of why we were doing what we did when we did; the old version of the building, this original version of this building we opened in 1999, the set of bonds that paid for that, we were paying off, we were rolling them off. So, we had an opportunity to put in a new set of bonds to do this renovation which would just go in in place of where the old one was. There would be no difference in tax rate or what people paid. It would just be a continuous smooth thing. So that was a whole piece of that where I had to work closely with Carmel Council. But the fun part was when construction started – sort of fun, this is also during COVID – we moved into a temporary location in an abandoned Marsh grocery store, and that was the library for a couple of years while this was under construction.

What changes would you like to implement in the future and/or what changes do you foresee libraries more generally undergoing as they continue to evolve?

I’m literally not even done with this because the construction company’s still here, we’re still going through the punch list. We’re still getting it all set up. But I do think – I have several thoughts – I think this iteration of the library has allowed us to more fully embrace our role as a community living room. You’ve probably heard the term “third space”. I think it’s important to be a third space because I think we’ve lost some. I’m 53; when I was young, some of the third spaces that people went to aren’t really major factors. Blockbuster Video was a huge place to see people on weekends and even record stores, bookstores; we still have some of those, but the impact is less than. It just feels like the third space area has shrunk some and libraries have really embraced that. So, if you look at libraries, our library and libraries generally now versus 20 to 25 years ago, I think the perception of the 20 to 25 years ago was much more on the collection, not as much on programs. There’s just a lot more of an expectation that I can go to the library and I’m going to hear a speaker, I’m going to hear an author, I’m going to explore an issue like climate change or bicycling or all kinds of things.

And not only that; about 20 to 25 years ago, there’s probably an expectation of, ‘I can’t talk; I can’t talk loud, I’m going to get shushed.’ We don’t shush anymore and there’s an expectation of noise level that is not where it used to be. You used to not be able to have coffee or food. Now we have a coffee shop in the library, and you can buy coffee and take it wherever you want. It’s funny, there was this big internal debate at my old library, and I’ve talked to people here. It’s funny because they were having the same internal debate here. And that was – a faction of people that worked in libraries were convinced that if we allowed coffee, that would destroy the library. This is not true. You can come in here with a coffee and hang out with people and talk in your normal voice and enjoy that third space. That’s an important direction.

How do you work with the Board of Trustees and how are major decisions made? I know you’ve also touched on the number of stakeholders and people that are involved in decisions. I’d love to hear more about that.

The Library Board has some governing responsibilities but one of the primary responsibilities that the board has is to hire and fire the library director. That’s who I report to, I report to the board. The board is responsible for overseeing my job performance. Having said that, the rest of the staff reports to me. The library director is in charge of the staff and so the board’s role stops with the director, but they have a major role in setting policy. As far as I’m concerned, as far as library policies goes, the way I approach it is that I will take recommended policy to the board. We’ll have discussions, the board will approve it; but from my side, if I’m taking a recommended policy to the board, I’ve already vetted it with my staff. I have staff leadership and I’m going to be able to tell the board, ‘this is what the staff thinks of this, and this is the reason that we’re recommending this policy,’ and I’m just bridging that between staff and board. I think it’s important for the board to have some awareness of staff opinions on things like that, but they get the final say. Sometimes I’ll bring a piece of policy and they’ll say we want to tweak this or this; generally, it’s a cordial good working relationship. So that’s another piece of it.

The board also has some financial oversight responsibilities. It works differently in different libraries, but here at Carmel our CFO or Chief Financial Officer also serves as Treasurer of the board, which is great. Sometimes you’ll have a board member be the Treasurer. Honestly, a lot of times they’re saying “What? What am I supposed to say here?” So, by having our CFO be the Treasurer, they’re getting really good, detailed reports and she can answer any questions they might have. It’s really necessary here in Indiana because the law gets pretty complex with how they handle the finances. We have to have multiple funds: the primary one is the operating fund, but there are other funds like the rainy-day fund, other things.

The next question is about book challenges. I’d love to hear your experiences or thoughts about recent conflicts, challenges, and controversies in library collections (book banning, attempts to censor books, challenges from parents) both here in Carmel and generally from your past experiences.

Before I do that, I have just one more thing for responsibility of library board: to be an advocate for the library and the community; to carry the library banner and be our ambassadors out in the community. That’s another important one. Ok, so book challenges.

Well, so far, *Swanay knocks on wood* we have not had a lot of trouble with that here in Carmel, but I’m sure you’re aware there has been an enormous amount of trouble in this county at Hamilton East Public Library^[4] and pretty much, like everyone else we’ve read about in the news. I think that is illustrative of how problematic it can be to get people on library boards that have agendas of some kind. So, so far so good, I feel fortunate that that sort of trouble hasn’t been here. I have had a number of [book] challenges in my career, a lot more when I was in Johnson City than in Carmel. So far, I’ve only had one formal challenge in the seven years that I have been here at Carmel. I probably had 10 or a dozen in the eight years that I was director at Johnson City. So, I do have experience with it.

I think the experience I had in Johnson City; I could talk about some of those challenges, but I think things have changed because at that time it wasn’t really part of the culture wars, and the culture wars were not as intense as they are now. Something happened at the end of 2016; the culture wars have just escalated and escalated, to the point where we are now. So, a lot of the current challenges that I see, that’s happening across the country, and, to a degree, that’s happened here in Hamilton County and other libraries, revolve around issues of racial equality, racial justice, LGBTQ issues, and I think it’s important. It’s important that we have those kinds of material in the collection because first of all, a lot of the things relating to racial equity and racial justice is tied with American history, and libraries have to be a place of factual information, of truth, and there has to be a space where ideas can be explored.

As a matter of fact, when I say, “has to be”, that’s per the Constitution, right. We have a First Amendment right to access information and it doesn’t really matter in the end if someone likes it or they don’t like it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to check it out. If you don’t like the book, you don’t have to read it. If you don’t like a program, you don’t have to attend it. But I think it gets stickier. By the way, have you looked at our Collection Development Policy?^[5] I think it’s really good. I think it’s a gold standard and it says in there somewhere that the library board considers every single work in the library to be constitutionally protected, and it’s on the challenger to prove that it isn’t. And I think that’s right, that is the way it is an extension. This library and libraries generally are manifestations of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech: if you’re free to say it, you’re free to write it down; if you’re free to write it down, someone’s free to publish it; if it’s published then the library can acquire it and someone else is free to read it. It’s all freedom of speech.

The challenges revolve around children and what’s good for children. That’s why the only way a library policy can handle that is to appropriately put the responsibility of guiding the reading direction of children on their parents or caregivers. We cannot or should not substitute our judgment for parents and so, parents are in control. A lot of these challenges are couched as “parental rights”, but it’s actually taking away choices from other parents that may want to make different decisions. The other key thing I always think about is, if you’re saying, ‘this book on, say, transgenderism is immoral and it’s grooming children, it needs to go, and it needs to be removed,’ you’re not just talking about the book. By extension, you’re talking about another person who’s going through that. If you say the book’s bad and can’t be here, that’s a way of saying that that person is bad and that person has no place in society, and libraries can’t do that because we serve every single person in the community. Every person. So, we’re not shutting out people that are making these challenges. We’re just accommodating other people with other interests and other points in life. I think this used to be something that was more of a shared understanding that the culture wars have thrown a monkey wrench in, but we have a responsibility to continue doing what we’re doing.

Thinking about other challenges you faced outside of book challenges: are there any examples or stories of challenges that you faced as a director and how you’ve responded?

You just never know as director. In my first year here, we had an issue with a backed-up plumbing pipe and the first floor quickly started being overrun with sewage water. The first thing I did was rolled up my sleeves and ran down there and got a mop and was trying to contain it. Then I realized – and I called our plumber – then I realized that it was getting out of control and it made it all the way to the children’s area. We got caution tape and put it around. It kept going and the plumber came; it just became a disaster. We had to remediate the damage and control it, we closed for the day, had to communicate to everyone. So that’s an example.

Just yesterday I had to appear in court, which was the first for me, to testify as to our Standards of Conduct^[6], because there were – I won’t get into details – two individuals that were involved in a domestic dispute had an encounter in the library. I got subpoenaed to show up in court just to talk about behavior in the library. Sometimes there are issues among staff that might need to be resolved. It’s the library director’s job to enforce Board-approved policies and if someone is doing something that’s violating our policy, I have to address it, be it patrons or staff, and so it could be any number of things. That could be it. Sometimes an elected official might call and ask for a favor and that can be hard to accommodate or be a sensitive issue. You never know, just never know.

What would you say are some of the most important skills or training or competencies that are necessary for a role like yours?

First of all, I think that for me – and people have different tracks on this – but for me, I feel like my background as a reference librarian and working in other positions in the library, working with the public, is invaluable. I really relate well to my staff because I have been one of them, and I still consider myself a staff member; those are my people, and I still do that work. I’m working one evening shift a week in all of our service desk areas for the next year just to stay in touch with staff and stay in touch with patrons. I think that experience is a good background to draw on, so I might recommend not being in such a hurry to get in admin where you’re losing the experience of all the great things that the library is doing every day. Sometimes I’m jealous of my staff and sometimes I question my life choices because I worked at the adult services desk on the 2nd floor last week and I had such a good time. I was helping people find books, I was helping people with their printing and some computer questions, and it’s just, there’s nothing like it. And in libraries, you get to be at a desk and your job is to help people and you’re not charging them, you’re not asking them for money; you just help, you just help; don’t bypass that. That would be my advice.

The next question is what advice would you give to students who are considering careers in libraries?

Well, we can go to the people part of it. Do you enjoy talking with people and can you handle being around people of varying opinions other than yours, and is that something that you can navigate? Do you feel like you have those people skills? I didn’t necessarily know that I had that within me. I mean, I   learned that I did, but it’s something to think about. Are you a relationship builder? And do you enjoy that? If the answer is no, then, well, there’s cataloging. There are other areas, but this is not a place to hide from people. You will have to have a lot of relationships with a lot of people.

Last question for today: can you share anything else about directorship or a library career that you think would benefit current students?

Anyone that’s in library school to go into this business: you’re going to embark on doing great work and be sure to enjoy it and savor it. And as far as directorship: have a relationship with your director. I love it when staff come up and talk to me, even if it’s something minor or not even related. Some staff will never want to talk to me because I’m the director, but I like getting to know staff and I think most directors In libraries appreciate conversations that they can have with their staff.

Academic Library Director

This interview with Claire Stewart, Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was conducted on November 10, 2023. Here is a communication from the Association of Research Libraries from February of 2023 that announces Claire Stewart’s appointment: Claire Stewart Named Dean of Libraries and University Librarian Designate for University of Illinois – Association of Research Libraries (arl.org)

Audio:

Here is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity:

This is an interview with Claire Stewart, Dean of Libraries and University Librarian at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Thank you, Claire, for taking the time to do this today.

Sure, my pleasure. I’m happy to talk. I get to talk about myself, who wouldn’t want to do that?

What is your educational background and career path that has led to academic library directorship?

I got my library degree in 1995 and I actually went directly from undergrad into library school, which I think is more common now, but at the time, was relatively unusual. I was a humanities student in undergrad. I have a bachelor’s degree in English literature with a minor in humanistic studies from Saint Mary’s College, which is a small women’s College in Indiana. Then I went directly from that into library school at what is now Dominican University, at the time it was Rosary. I made that choice primarily because I grew up in Evanston and that was the program that allowed me to go back to the Chicago area. So, I started working as a half-time filing clerk at Northwestern University Library the same month I started in library school. Kind of an interesting way I got that job; my high school boyfriend’s best friend’s father was the interim Dean of Libraries At Northwestern, so I am totally an example of completely unearned privilege. I know it was just a temporary job, but that opened the door for me, and then I spent the next 21 years of my career at Northwestern. After I got my degree, of course, I stayed on.

I think I had about 8 different jobs during the time I was there. I was always the digital kid. So, luck of timing, this was 1993 when I started, 1994 when I got my first full time job and they needed somebody to help get this ‘Electronic Reserve’ thing up and running. It was one of the first ones in the country and this was at the time when the web was just becoming a thing. So, I got to help set up the first web server the libraries had ever had, the first scanning equipment the libraries had never had, the first Mac computer in the library. It was a weird luck-of-timing thing and that set the stage for, really, my whole career. I was also pulled in by colleagues to help, because I had this interest in and facility with technology, to help on programs that were trying to help faculty get technology into the classroom. I got to work with people who were teaching people how to build websites and learn how to use digital media, which of course was extremely primitive at the time. Then from that I progressed; I was always the one who had ideas about how to translate that into library services, so I proposed that, after we experimented with streaming technology for a little bit, that we set up a whole service to do digitization of all kinds of content for faculty. So, not just the course readings, but streaming video, streaming audio; then that led to building large digital collections, and that led to being a key liaison to other parts of campus to figure out what is going on with this massive explosion in computerized research, which led to: what’s the library’s role in publishing and data curation and all that. So that was a lot over 21 years, it was a very dynamic time.

I think, even though I had never really had any experience as a traditional reference, research support librarian, the fact that I had set up so many new things was why the University of Minnesota was interested in hiring me. So, I spent four and a half years there as an associate university librarian, basically associate Dean, in charge of all of the libraries except for the ones that served the health sciences fields. Ten of the twelve libraries were in my portfolio. I did that for four and a half years and then my Dean retired. I think I would have stayed at Minnesota a lot longer; it was a great place to be, lots of opportunity, but my Dean retired and so I was faced with: do I want to work for another Dean, do I want to apply for that job or do I want to consider this an opportunity to go somewhere else. That was what led to me applying for the Dean position at University of Nebraska, Lincoln. I was there for just shy of four years during COVID times, so it felt like a lot longer and then I never really planned to leave because it was a great job. I loved it there. But when this job opened up, I was like, OK, it’s Illinois. How could I not at least throw my hat in for that job? So that’s what led to my coming here.

Can you talk us through your main tasks and responsibilities on either a day-to-day or week-to-week basis?

Well, I’m in my first six months so I think that what I’m spending my time doing now is not what a Dean of libraries would typically be spending their time doing. But as I’m learning the organization and trying to focus on; we are really committed to trying to improve the library culture and in particular making sure that all of our employees, not just the faculty, but the staff – and we have a lot of excellent staff in the libraries and actually all academic libraries have a really strong staff component – making sure that those folks have opportunity to have voice. So, a lot of what I’m doing is, I would say, culture focused and that means 90% of my time right now is I think I need to get to know people, I need to make sure I get why things are the way they are, rather than just coming in like, “well, let’s start changing stuff,” because that would just be a catastrophe.

The other parts of my job that I should be giving more time to and will over time, though, is that external to the library relations thing. So, representing the library and having strategic conversations with other Deans, with the Provost, with the Chancellor. That’s understanding what the university is doing and making sure what we are well connected. The other part of that is the external relations in terms of our donors, our supporter community, helping raise money. So ideally, I think I should get to a third, a third and a third: where a third of what I’m doing is focused on the library and internal, but at a pretty strategic level because I should not be getting involved in operational day-to-day stuff. That’s a good way to drive everybody nuts; keep it at, what are the structural things that we need to focus on: what is our vision? Where are we going? Then how do we need to change whatever it is: organizational structure, people’s jobs, pay structures, all of that stuff – is really where I need to keep my attention focused. I have a lot of meetings, basically top to bottom all day long in meetings, but it’s on a pretty wide variety of things right now.

Speaking of changes and innovations, what changes and innovations have you been responsible for managing and directing either here or over the course of your academic library administration career?

As I was saying about my time at Northwestern, I proposed a lot of new stuff and that’s been a pattern. Although by the time I transitioned to Minnesota, what I was doing was supporting the people who had the ideas to start new stuff and making sure they could be successful. To give you 2 examples from my time at Minnesota; there’s an exceptional map library at the University of Minnesota Libraries and it is very active and connected to the community, broadly speaking. They had started collaborating with an independent scholar who was doing a project that eventually became Mapping Prejudice^[7]. The idea was that they would take 2 million property deeds from Hennepin County, get them all digitized – which meant negotiating with the County Register of Deeds office, which took years – bringing them into a technology environment where they can first have a quick dirty optical character recognition, and then connect that output to a crowdsourcing tool so that members of the community could help identify which property deeds had racially restricted components. That would be something that said, when the when the parcel of land was created, no one except a white person will ever purchase this property. The person who owned it first was not allowed to sell it to anyone: a black person, a Jewish person in a lot of cases: that would be racially restrictive covenants. This really predated redlining. So, it started in that area in about the 1910s.

Over time they developed this very comprehensive data set that showed – and then they mapped it – over time, you could see exactly where these property deeds started, how they propagated throughout Hennepin County and when you overlay that with other data like, where were the predominantly African American neighborhoods, and then later, where did they start running expressways and when red lining came in, which neighborhoods were deemed as undesirable? You could just see this very pernicious discriminatory activity; where it started and then how it spread over time.

So, that was an example of: I didn’t do that, all I did was make sure that that independent scholar, we brought them in and gave them an appointment. We made sure we helped them. Lots of people wanted to give financial support to this project, so it was really just giving it an administrative home and then championing it, making sure it always had technology, resources, and things like that. It became a major vector for very important community conversations. Lots and lots of citizen groups across the city of Minneapolis and the county participated actively. It became like a very large-scale learning activity. This was before we were having this volatile conversation nationally about critical race theory and what is systemic racism. So, I always think of it as: well, you think it’s imaginary, but it is clearly not, there it is. And I think that’s a very powerful thing for libraries and archives to be able to do.

It also became a really important recruiting tool for a new program at Minnesota called Heritage Studies and Public History. That was a collaboration that really wanted to focus on bringing individuals from minoritized groups into cultural heritage and stewardship professions. They had things like really significant grant funding from the Mellon foundation so that students in that master’s program didn’t have to pay, they had funding for their tuition. The project became both a huge recruiting tool for that program, but then also an opportunity of a ready-made lab for a lot of those students to do meaningful work, and community engaged work.

Maybe that’s enough of an example, just that one, I mean there have been a couple more things like that, and it’s a good example of how I see an administrator’s role; to make sure that people here – work like that is important and it should be a priority for us and it should probably be a priority for us over what we think of as our traditional work. Depending on the organization, that conversation goes more or less smoothly because nobody’s saying “well, the library can stop checking out books so that you have time to do that.” So, there’s pressure to figure out how to still do your more traditional things, but then also make capacity and tell people it’s OK – maybe not forever – but for six months you can deprioritize this other thing that had been a traditional big part of your work so that you can refocus on this other thing. That’s what I feel like in my role as a senior administrator and a leader – maybe at a slightly different level now because of the size of this organization – but just to communicate that message: It’s OK if we talk about de-prioritizing something so that we can focus on other things. You know, what does that look like? It’s OK if we try things and they don’t work out. It’s OK if we need to hire new people to do new things. That’s a big part of what I think is my role in this job.

How about the future – what changes and innovations are you thinking about implementing for the future; or if you want to talk about academic libraries in general, how do you see them needing to change and innovate for the future?

Well, I have many thoughts about this. Let me see, I’ll just pick a couple. I was at the Diversity Breakfast this morning. It was really nice to see that one of the projects that the archivists here have been doing for a long time around black student enrollment was funded by the Office of Access and Equity, and I think that’s a very powerful model to be looking for things that are of interest to other parts of our organization. I think there is no shortage of those things here at Illinois. I learned not long ago that, I think, 75% of the African American community in this area is at or below the poverty line, which I had no idea. I was pretty shocked to hear that that’s a more significant problem than even in the Chicago area when you look at number of kids who come from African American families who need school lunch and things like that.

So, I feel like there’s work for us to do. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what the library has in terms of content, but probably more important, expertise that can help with that problem. Is it about understanding the history that led to that? Why does this situation exist? What role did the university have in either making that worse or making it better over time? We have these amazing business librarians who do consulting with student groups who are offering consulting services to the community. It’s not a direct connection to business development in the community and entrepreneurship, but it’s a very important indirect connection. There are things like that. I think we just have to be very attuned to not only the needs of our university community, which of course is always our primary work. But, what is it that we have that’s unique, that can directly help with trying to solve, collaboratively with the community, some of the big problems that they’re trying to solve.

When I think about research libraries nationally and globally, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals^[8]. What does that mean? A lot of universities are focused on trying to interpret their mission and their historical strengths to connect well with feeding the world, making sure everyone has access to education, gender equity. Even if you were just to look across the Big 10 libraries (which has been 15 libraries, but it’s going to be 19 libraries or 18, I think soon, with our expansion), there’s a scale there that might allow us to do things that really make a measurable difference, certainly in providing open, unfettered access to information. That’s at the core; that’s easy. It should be easy. Information equity, information injustice is a huge problem. So there’s some things there. But when you think about iniquitous forces like misinformation, the potential for abuse of information, criminalization of information. When I think about the International and Area Studies library that we have here, that’s been a historic strength of this library, things like the Slavic reference service. When those were first founded in the 1960s and 1970s, they were directly responding to things like extreme censorship in Russia. So, I think we have a very long and proud history of responding to not just local things, but global problems and trying to find ways to connect our expertise.

I think we have to be bold. It’s a really challenging environment right now because when we try to work together across states and across libraries across countries, we see such differential things happening. Colleagues are in states that are developing anti-diversity laws or prohibiting conversations about certain kinds of so-called divisive topics and book banning on the rise. That is hard even at an elite research R1 institution. The very large research libraries that are attached to those institutions are really hamstrung because sometimes it’s their state legislature, sometimes it’s their university board that is telling them they can’t. It’s a pretty frightening environment to be in. It’s hard. I feel incredibly lucky to be here in Illinois where you know, I’m pretty confident nothing like that would ever happen. If anything, we’re on the vanguard of pushing back against that kind of thing. But I do have to be mindful of what my colleagues at other institutions are dealing with. It’s tough to figure out what your path forward is because we want to be collectively a very strong voice in continuing to advance diversity; yes, we provide information about abortion. That’s always been part of what libraries do. Yes, LGBTQ people. We represent the full diversity of the human experience, but there are very significant forces pushing back in the opposite direction. I feel like that’s a big part of what we need to be focused on doing.

On a more positive leaning note, one of the things that I would like to make sure of is that we have this evolving conversation in Illinois about generative AI. And at all institutions – we’re really thinking about, yeah, there’s things about that that are scary and problematic, but what about it is going to allow us to solve problems that we have struggled to scale in the past? I saw this fantastic presentation yesterday or the day before, about a team that is using human-in-the-loop technologies and machine learning to try to train tools to do a better job of detecting text on maps. This turns out to have been a really challenging problem over the years. Maps are obviously graphical objects, but they have lots of structured information and data in them as well. This is a very persistent problem with historical information: how do you get that into a computable form too? When I think about – I’m always dismayed to see that discovery has not gotten significantly better after all these decades of us doing highly structured, standards-based, descriptive cataloging and finding aids that are encoded in EAD^[9], discovery still sucks. It’s still hard to find things. Is there a way that we can use some of these tools to accelerate some of that work, whether it’s extracting data or building better discovery engines or whatever it is? I’m really excited about things like that. When I think about our information literacy expertise in some of our very traditional areas of scholarly focus, some of the things, as a field, as a discipline, as a practice, where we have led, I see obvious connections to AI literacy, data literacy. You know, all of the things that are desperately needed, but where people might not naturally think to turn to the library for that expertise. That’s our challenge: to make sure people know we’re about information and information problems. We’re not just about keeping books on shelves and buying stuff.

How do you work within the organizational structure of the wider university and how are major decisions about the library’s operations and resources made?

Since I’m new, I’m still figuring that one out. We’re an interesting beast in the library because we are both an academic unit and a tenure granting unit with our own faculty, just like all the other colleges. And we’re classed that way; led by an academic Dean. But we’re not a revenue generating institution. We’re a common good. When you look at it from a financial perspective, I always say we live on the other side of the ledger than a revenue generating school like the iSchool or School of Business. Because of that and because we are expected to collaborate with everybody and be responsive to the information needs of all disciplines, as a leader of the library, my job is to make sure I’m connecting well with the Deans and all the other schools, that I understand their priorities and am helping to translate that for the library, that they understand what we do or what we can do so that we can transcend some of the more traditional thinking, and then also to be communicating about that and being attentive to what the senior level of the university administration wants to achieve. Some of the examples we talked about earlier are hopefully pretty good indicators of what your library could do.

We have to be responsible stewards of the money that is given to us to do what we do because. The wonderful thing about being at Illinois is that the university has always treasured and valued its library, and that is deeply meaningful to everybody who works here, they can take their work extremely seriously. It has also meant the university has financially supported the library well. But there are limits to that. We are in in so many ways an endless…there is no end to the ambition that we have and the things that we could do if we have sufficient resources. So for me, a part of the job is to be a responsible steward; not to hold back when people need to hear: “no, we need better support than that; Yeah, we need money, inflation on journal subscriptions runs 4 to 10% every year, so if we don’t get at least a fraction of that, if not all of it, we’re going to be cutting and that’s going to be bad for everybody.

So that’s the challenge I’m meant to be working with the faculty and staff in the library to make sure to evolve everyone’s skills and everyone’s ability to be professionally engaged and to be engaged with the community, so facilitating that kind of thing. Bringing back ideas here, making sure our ideas are translated. Decision making, I honestly couldn’t tell you yet. The budget model has a certain way that it works, but then there’s how it works on paper and how it really works. So, ask me again in six months. Having been a Dean at another place, I know it really does actually take a couple of years before you really understand: who are the people I really need to talk to, who’s going to give me the information about how this really works, who do I need to persuade, how do I get information out there without overwhelming people. So, a lot of an administrator’s job is being judicious and politically astute about that, because everybody could go in and just scream and yell about how much they need, how they need more money; totally ineffective as a strategy.

Can you discuss other areas that you’re involved in with your role: other parts of the university, committees you might serve on, or other professional development you might do outside the library?

What I haven’t mentioned is I’m also active in entities that are above or outside of the universities. I’m currently the Chair of the Board of the HathiTrust^[10]. I represent the Big 10 Academic Alliance^[11], one of the two members of that group that sit on the board of Hathi. I have the good fortune to be board chair while we’re doing a major strategic visioning which is touching on a lot of the things that we were talking about: like what is the future of the HathiTrust Research Center, which is a co-project of the iSchool here and at Indiana University and does really great things with computational views on the digitized corpus. I think the ambition there in the member libraries is really high, especially to use that corpus to try to solve some of our metadata problems and other things that are more internally focused. So, I spend a lot of time, this year in particular, doing that.

The Big 10 Directors is a very active community peer group, I’m active in that. Up until this calendar year, I was chair of a key committee on the Association of Research Libraries^[12]: Advocacy and Public Policy. That’s helping that whole community of major research libraries advocate effectively with our counterparts in government to make sure copyright law doesn’t get totally out of whack, which there’s always a risk of that. There are very powerful content industry lobbyists who are usually ahead of us in line in terms of getting the ear of legislators. So, we’re part of a coalition that speaks for the public interest and wants to make sure that copyright law is always balanced. That’s just one policy area that you could think about. I don’t spend as much time, except for Hathi, on that now just because I’m learning my new job but that’s really important. I feel an obligation to continue to represent Illinois well because we are such a major research library and this has been such an innovative place and the leader in the profession. I was told that when I was hired, to make sure to sustain that.

Can you share some examples or stories of challenges that you’ve faced, and how you’ve responded?

It’s interesting, I was just coming out of this Diversity Breakfast. This isn’t a challenge here, but one of the things that I learned at Minnesota is, wherever possible, when our librarians and archivists are providing major intellectual contributions to exhibits or research publications, to make sure to advocate that they be fully credited where appropriate as co-creators, co-curators, co-authors. We had this experience at Minnesota. There was a really fantastic history project that was looking at racism and anti-Semitism at the University of Minnesota in the 1920s and 1930s. And there was an archivist in particular who put a ton and ton and ton and ton of time into that project but wasn’t actually credited as a co-curator of the exhibit, even though it was in the library space, all our materials, major intellectual contributions. And what happened as a result of that was, when things then grew out of that – which was really good; very, very meaningful conversations on campus about the university’s history and about why buildings were named the way they were and the true history of the people for whom buildings had been named – the libraries and the archivists were not included in those conversations the way they should have been. So pretty much since then, I’ve been kind of insistent to the point of being pushy about making sure that we are careful about that.

And when I was at Nebraska, there was an exhibit that was in the library on the 50th anniversary of the LGBTQ studies. And it was started by a faculty member in the English department. It was their history project. But they worked very closely with the archivists. And I really pushed the archivists: it’s in our space. I want your name on it. And because I want to be able to speak about this if anyone calls and wants to challenge us on this exhibit. And sure enough, within a week or so of it going up, I was getting angry emails from an alum. And so, I could step up and speak on behalf of the library and on behalf of the university: why is this exhibit in the library? I authorized this exhibit to be in the library; Who gave you the right to do that? I’m the Dean of libraries. I have the right to do that, I’m an officer of the university; Who gave you the right to put this material up there? We believe strongly in archives and in the library that we collect materials that represent the full diversity of the human experience. So that’s just one example, there have been a couple more like that, nothing since I’ve gotten here. But I’m trying to make sure that we’re not just doing the work, but that we are able to speak on behalf of the work as intellectual contributors. And this is a common problem with library work, right? It’s invisible work in a lot of ways and it drives me nuts when I see news stories about things that were “lost in the archives” like as though we didn’t intentionally collect and save them, right?

So those have been some tough things. There will always be tough things in terms of personnel & human resources, difficult decisions to be made. Things that happen where we have to make hard calls. Often where we just do not have the ability to speak openly about them. This year in July, actually, I had 100 people from AFSCME^[13] show up in my office who were very upset about the position that we were eliminating. Even though that decision had been made before I got here, I’m the one who had to speak to those people and say, no, we’re not rescinding this. Of course, I couldn’t tell the full story of why. That’s always a challenge for an administrator: when you can’t speak, someone else will fill in the gaps. And in this case, things were said about that that were just patently false, and I just couldn’t say anything about that. We did end up fine and ultimately the solution to that, we were willing to work with before it got to the level that it did, we’re still paying that person’s salary. They were moved to another part of the university. Also something that’s not been said publicly, but sometimes you solve problems, and you don’t get credit for solving problems. That’s part of being an administrator is sometimes you just have to be the person that people want to yell at. Comes with the job. It’s hard for people who are in administration for the first time to learn that. Especially if you’re a people pleaser and you want to make people’s lives better and we’re all committed to that. For the most part. But also, just being OK that people are going to be angry with you. And that’s part of the job, too. You’re not going to do it wantonly; you’re not going to seek it out. But you cannot make 100% of people happy sometimes, and that is part of the job, especially at this senior level. You got to take heat off other people. Comes with the job.

Thinking about students: what do you think are the most important skills or training or competencies necessary for students to have to work in administration?

I think being a really good listener and getting comfortable with giving people feedback as soon as possible. That’s a really important thing for people who are managers, and then obviously leaders, to learn and to be comfortable with. I would say we really struggle with that. We probably struggle with it just as a human race, right, and I think a lot of the problems that we have in general is not being able to sit down with somebody that you’re having a problem with and be honest about it in as nice and as kind and as constructive ways as possible, and I think it’s super important for people in management to learn to do that early.

And I think just to listen, to spend time with your people, to listen. To try to come up with solutions that empower people. I’m a big believer in self-determination theory and things like making sure that you’re mindful that people feel and understand every job has value. Everybody’s work contributes in some way, to give everyone as much leeway as possible to determine how their work connects to the broader mission and that that will vary so much depending on whether it’s a student worker or a senior faculty member, obviously. But I think in every job it’s possible to give people agency so that they can determine; for everybody to see that how their work is contributing to the mission. I think those are really important things to helping people grow. I think giving people opportunity is important. I find a lot of joy in being an administrator because that’s part of the job.

But you also have to be comfortable with the hard stuff. I think that it’s a trial by fire no matter what, the first time you lead a group or supervise people. Because It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable for a lot of people to learn how to do that. To learn how to give bad news – someone taught me you can do good news over e-mail, but always do bad news in person because you really need to be eyeball-to-eyeball and give them time to talk through it. Those are just a couple of things.

What advice would you give to students who are considering careers in either library administration or academic libraries in general?

Well, getting a job in the library while you’re in library school or before you go to library school is really helpful. What I love so much, this is the first place I’ve worked where there’s been an iSchool. None of the other places I’ve worked at had a Library Science program so I am as happy as can be. I love that we have this very robust GA program. I know it’s really valuable teaching, but it doesn’t have to be through that. It could be all kinds of others. But I think actually working in a library is really, really important. It gives you a leg up on the job market, but also gives you things to talk about when you’re applying and considering that in someone who’s new, so I feel like that’s important. It doesn’t have to be in an academic library. It could be public library experience that translates. Particularly at earlier career stages, it definitely translates. We’re trying to be better about recognizing people’s lived experience and how that contributes to their ability to work in academic libraries. So I would say: think about the work that you do in your family and your immediate community. That all is really important stuff. My hope is that libraries are, over time, better about being clear that we see a connection between that and the work that we do. Not all of us are great at that, but we’ll get there. I think being able to make those connections for a future employer is important and to be able to speak with some depth of detail about how that translates.

I feel very strongly that you know, it’s on us, people like me, especially people who look like me, who’ve had all kinds of privileges that we didn’t earn, to make sure that we are creating a hiring environment that doesn’t do things like disadvantage people who haven’t had financial support to go to conferences in the past, or present papers, or serve on committees. Because there’s so many reasons why people’s family situations or their work situations just did not support that, so I think particularly as we’re trying to hire people into their first library job, we need to be mindful of that. That’s not so much advice to students as something I think people like me need to be thinking about.

But students are really great at calling us on it. I appreciate programs like the ARL’s Kaleidoscope Scholars, Spectrum Scholars, leadership programs. I’ve had very powerful experiences, even student groups – now since I’m new here, I haven’t had a chance to work with a lot of the iSchool student groups — but we listen, we want to listen, we should listen. But most of us do want to. We just want to. So, I think that’s something I would also encourage students to be doing. Those of us who are at my level are nearing the end of our careers. I’ve probably got at least another, I hope, 10 to 15 years. I’m 51, so hopefully I’ll be around for a little while, but I am very conscious that I’m already 30 years into my career, and so the future of the profession is not me, it’s you all. And you all have a very different approach and a very different outlook. When I was new, we were very focused on learning and understanding technology and things like that. We were very focused on copyright and open access and things like that. And that was where a lot of our activism came in. I think your generation of librarians and new people to the profession are focused also on a lot of information justice issues, but in a very different way. And you have a lot to teach us. So don’t be shy about speaking up and telling us what we need to hear.

Is there anything else that you want to share about directorship or library work or your career that you think would benefit current students?

Well, it’s going to be hard. Everybody has tough times in their lives. I’d say you should expect your work environment to treat you well. One of the things I’ve been saying lately is: it’s OK to cry at work. I cry at work; I’ve cried here in the not-too-distant past. It wasn’t actually about the job. It was about something else that had happened, but yeah. I think in general, I’m big on making sure that we’re creating humane environments and that we’re treating people with respect and trusting our people. I think people who are new to the profession have and should have very high expectations for their leaders. And if you do that, then eventually by the time you all are leading the profession, then things will be in much better shape. I hope. I hope. Yeah, I really do. Yeah, we have a lot of room for improvement, a lot.